Our 1,000th Blog Post!

One thousand posts ago I decided that I needed to get back into writing and I knew I had an outlet in one of my favorite topics: comic books. I’ve read them for the better part of 30 years and I could discuss them endlessly (as evidenced by a year of enthusiastic blogging).

It’s been a tremendous experience sharing my opinions, expressing my affinity, and—I’m hopeful—putting some readers onto books they might not have otherwise picked up. My first two posts were reviews of the Avengers and Flash relaunches from last summer. While somewhat rusty, it was a thrill to write reviews again—I studied Journalism for too long before finally bidding adieu to college.

It was a thrill—God, beyond a thrill—to have someone I’d never met tell me that he enjoyed what I was doing on the blog. That’s the insecure writer in me, always looking for a little bit of validation. Since then, I’ve written many, many more reviews, shared my disdain (too many times) for the “Grounded” storyline in Superman, explained how to sell your comic books online, described the perfect comic shop, reminisced about some of my favorite childhood reads, played the Fantastic Four dead pool, and so on and so forth.

"Am I that nasally?" asked Ventura.

Late last year, one of the best friends a guy could have, Jerry Ahern suggested we do a comic book podcast. I’m not sure what my reply was—nothing quote worthy I’m sure, but I agreed to it. And on January 23, 2011, the Cape Town Community Podcast was born! And that was the end of weekends for me as I knew it! Have you listened to the show yet? I think it sounds like we are having a good time reviewing comic books—because we really are! I’m always shocked by what comes out of our mouths, whether we are imitating Bruce Banner’s androids or discussing how Karen Starr colors her hair.

Since then, Jerry has been my enthusiastic co-blogger. He’s gone from his own “All Things Super” blog to posting superheroic pontifications here on Cape Town full time. As much work as the whole adventure has become—it has been an extremely gratifying year. Perhaps one of the best experiences was attending the Wizard World Anaheim Comic Convention, where we got to introduce ourselves to a ton of new folks—some of whom are still listening to our weekly podcast. You can listen to the show we recorded from there right here.

We have recently adopted the extraordinary Max Beckman into the fold. Max manages the world’s greatest comic shop, Pulp Fiction (in Long Beach, CA), and is a damned encyclopedia of comic book knowledge (though he modestly reminds me that he has a terrible memory for comic book facts). After I friended Max on Facebook I could always count on him posting a correction to some factual error that Jerry or I had made on the current week’s episode. Nowadays I get a much more discreet text.

So here we are just a year into this adventure and we’re about to make another big step—becoming a full-fledged website. We’re moving from less of a blog to something more, dare I say it, websitey. My good buddy Mike Wilson has been hard at work designing something special for us. The new logo to the site (above) is pretty sleek if I do say so myself. The goal is to attract more writers who are also interested in espousing comic views to the masses and building a unique voice in comic discussion.

One thousand posts down and many more thousands to go.